


A Mirror

by thraenthraen



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Christmas, F/F, Gen, Immigration & Emigration, M/M, Muggle-born, Other, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 19:54:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5678590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thraenthraen/pseuds/thraenthraen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens with muggle-born kids who don't have access to their local wizarding community? For example, those who live in places with blood supremacy laws or in countries that lack a wizarding government? Many things could happen; this is just one young muggle-born's story.</p>
<p>A short, light story for the holidays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mirror

She came on my eleventh birthday, a strange woman with a funny accent. She wore long robes, and I remember thinking for some reason that she looked like the pictures in my history book. I asked if she was a time traveller. She wasn't.

I didn't speak English, but she promised me they'd help me learn. Who? I asked. The school she was taking me to, the school for witches and wizards. Like me, she told me. Like her.

I went. I don't think I had a choice. There was something wrong with me—everywhere I went, strange, terrifying things happened, and I'd been kicked out of school after school since I started. My family had struggled to raise me, to keep me safe from myself. That day was the first time someone offered to help us.

I promised to email my parents every day.

London both scared and excited me. I couldn't understand a thing and kept asking her to tell me what things said. I learned how to say wand and owl and books and newt and magic. I forgot, too, and she told me again. Knut, Sickle, Galleon. The school would pay for all my supplies, she explained. I asked if I could send some of the coins back to my family, pay for all the damages I'd caused. My family had never complained. She told me wizard money can't do that, but if I studied hard, one day I'd be able to fix everything I had broken. I promised I would.

I practiced the phrases she taught me over and over until I walked through the brick wall and found myself once again in the magical world, staring at a shining red train. I stumbled through the phrases—hello, my name is, good to meet you—with the kids in my compartment. I listened to them talk for hours. They helped me and my broken English buy sweets from the trolley.

My first year was hard. I sat through lessons in English, hardly understanding anything, and then I had the lessons all over again with just the teacher and that woman, translating and teaching me more. A lot of it wasn't even English; ancient Greek and Latin echoed through every hall in the words of incantations.

I never emailed my parents. Wizards didn't have internet. Instead, I sent owls. It took forever for the owl to get there, but they never complained.

Christmas came quickly. I wanted to go home. I wanted a break from struggling to understand, to find words. But I stayed. Home was too far. My parents couldn't meet me in London, and I was too young and scared to make the journey back from London on my own. I stayed. She didn't. Alone in a castle with no translation.

I woke up on Christmas morning to my excited dorm mate tugging on my sleeve. “C’mon!” they said. “Presents!”

The common room had been filled with decorations for weeks, but now there were six stockings hanging over the fire and a pile of presents under the tree. My dorm mate handed me a stocking—I was shocked to see my name on it—and a small pile of gifts. I hadn't expected anything.

From my parents—why hadn't I expected anything from them?—I had books and photos and sweets of home. The books were all about magic. They were written by muggles—that's what my family were, I learned—but they'd tried. From my dorm mate—a pang of guilt hit me as I hadn't realised we were exchanging gifts—a small figurine of a famous Quidditch player who zoomed around the room on a tiny broomstick. From the witch who'd brought me here, a mirror with a note explaining that she'd gone to visit my parents and give them the other half. The mirror was magic and would let me talk to my parents whenever we wanted, no need for slow owls.

I used the mirror immediately. My dorm mate insisted on meeting my parents too, on depending on me to translate the words they didn't understand the way I'd depended on a witch with a funny accent to translate for me. When my parents said the mirror was “just like Skype,” my dorm mate gaped in amazement at the ingenuity of muggles, that muggles around the world could communicate so much faster than owls, so much faster than most witches and wizards. I cried seeing my parents faces again, hearing their voices again. I missed home.

 

“I'll go with you,” my dorm mate told me firmly a year later. When I explained that they wouldn't be able to understand anything anyone said, they shrugged. “You didn't understand English when you came here, but you still came.” I tried to explain that that was different, that I hardly had a choice. “I want to meet your family. For real.”

And so I went home for Christmas my second year. My dorm mate spent the whole journey eagerly asking me to practice the phrases of my own language I had taught them, preparing like I once had to enter a world that spoke a different language.

My parents were overjoyed. I'd never seen them so happy. They'd never seen me have a friend. A best friend.

I stopped taking extra lessons. My English was good enough; I didn't need them anymore. In my free time, I learned I like flying.

Christmas my third year, I met my best friend’s family. Their parents Apparated us from the train station. I threw up as soon as we stopped hurtling through the countryside. They invited me back for the summer anyway.

The years passed, Christmases and summers spent at Hogwarts, at home, at my best friend’s home blurred together over the years. They kissed me, or maybe I kissed them, it didn’t matter. After the first time, we just never stopped. I learned magic, both the kind that flowed through my wand and the kind that lived in people.

My last year at Hogwarts, I went home for Christmas alone. I turned seventeen there, and the Trace was lifted. I fixed things. I patched the holes in the walls I had made as a child, unaware of my power or how to control it. I stitched back together the frayed, unravelling bedsheets. I sealed the roof. I thanked my family, for they had given me so much people magic that it overflowed from me into wand magic. I could never contain it.

I moved to London. There were jobs for people like me in London, and my best friend, my partner, my spouse was there. St. Mungos, where I became a Healer, was there. And I had the mirror. My family were just on the other side.


End file.
